Jurassic July

 With summer holidays well under way and kids around NI off school, it may be no surprise that the cinema box office is dominated by superhero blockbusters in their various guises, from Ant Man and the Wasp to The Incredibles 2. Even Hotel Transylvania has gone on Summer Vacation! Finding itself somewhere around the top of the pops since its release has been Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the latest instalment in the epic dino-series.

This year also marks the 25^th anniversary of the first Jurassic Park film, which set new standards in special effects and continues to stand up as a masterpiece of the adventure genre, spawning all manner of weird and wonderful (ahem) tributes. Despite the roaring success of the franchise, the Natural History Museum has pointed out a few flaws in the most recent film's dino-knowledge. In the footage below, Dr Michael Benton, now at Bristol but then at Queen’s, discusses his work as a palaeontologist, and gives us some insight into the Jurassic world of Northern Ireland…

Of course, things have moved on a bit since this footage was taken, with the discovery of an ichthyosaur skeleton in 1999, unearthed around Waterloo Bay, close to Larne, which forms part of Northern Ireland’s own Jurassic coast. Although it’s rare to find a fossil on that scale, ammonites and other smaller fossils abound – so maybe it’s time to head out of the cinema and harvest some dino DNA yourself. Just be careful what you do with it…after all, life, uh, finds a way…